


The Devil You Know

by 94BottlesOfSnapple



Category: Zero Escape (Video Games)
Genre: Free the Soul, Gen, Introspection, Kidnapping, Uneasy Allies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:21:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28062327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/94BottlesOfSnapple/pseuds/94BottlesOfSnapple
Summary: This isn’t the first time Akane Kurashiki has woken somewhere unfamiliar with a headache and stiff joints and no memory of how she got there.Akane wakes up in a cell and has to escape with an unexpected ally.
Relationships: Kurashiki Akane & Hongou Gentarou
Comments: 6
Kudos: 13
Collections: ZEcret Santa 2020





	The Devil You Know

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kiichu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiichu/gifts).



> Happy holidays, Emi! :D Hope you like your gift — this prompt really hit me over the head with inspiration! Something about enemies cooperating is always fun to write.

This isn’t the first time Akane Kurashiki has woken somewhere unfamiliar with a headache and stiff joints and no memory of how she got there. Unfortunately, she knows it probably won’t be the last. That’s just how your life tends to go when you’re locked in an endless, multiverse-spanning battle against a doomsday cult.

Her first instinct is to grab hold of the river of time in front of her, to study its myriad possibilities. But she can’t marshal enough focus. The morphogenetic field slips through her fingers like sand. Instead, Akane levers herself up to a sitting position and looks around.

The room spins for a moment before settling into clarity. It’s small, more of a pod than a room, and the walls are plated in metal. No windows, just a large steel door with no handle or knob, and a vent in the far corner that’s too small for anything but a rabbit. There is no furniture.

With a groan, Akane drags a hand down her face and forces down the dregs of her nausea. Then, she stands.

The pod is barely six feet across from either direction, or so she estimates from the number of steps it takes to cross from one side to the other. Even a close examination reveals no window or camera. No safe to crack or puzzle to solve, like there would be in a Nonary Game. Not a single loose screw, no access to remove the door hinges, nothing trapped in the vent that she can reach when she wiggles her fingers through the tiny slats.

And yet, ventilation. Air. She’s being kept alive, at least for now. Which means, eventually, someone will have to open the door to feed her.

Sitting again and folding her legs comfortably beneath her, Akane resigns herself to waiting.

* * *

After almost three hours, the vent begins to hiss. Cracking open her eyes reveals a thick white gas pouring into the room. Foolishly, Akane can’t stop her own sharp inhale of surprise, and a lungful of the gas has her head spinning. She drops to the floor, then yanks up the collar of her sweater to cover her mouth and nose.

There’s no camera, she reminds herself, and begins to inch towards the door. They’re going to pump the room with gas until they’re good and sure she’s been knocked out, then bring in food so their guard doesn’t have to worry about being caught unawares. All Akane has to do is stay low and awake and close to the exit.

She breathes shallowly, through the thick fabric of the sweater, and counts the seconds. She’s almost to two hundred when the vent stops pumping gas into the room. She’s at five hundred and twelve before the smoke has dissipated completely. On count six hundred, the door cracks open.

Akane hurtles through it, lunging for the cloaked legs of the person outside. Unbalanced, they topple forward and into the pod, just like she planned. Leaping to her feet, Akane slams the door closed on her erstwhile captor before they can so much as shout, then dusts off her hands and begins to take a look around.

The room she’s emerged into is more of a small hallway than a room. It’s lined with a handful of doors — her own and another cell on one wall, a door opposite, and one more door on the perpendicular wall to her right. That one is where the unfortunate clone now trapped in the cell came from, most likely. Compared to the doors across the hall which have windows and slots, and the cell doors which have a large wheel and a keypad, it’s bizarrely nondescript. A service entrance. Staff only.

It would be the easiest way out, architecturally — but it’s probably also crawling with clones just like the one now locked in the cell behind her. One on one with the element of surprise is one thing, and outnumbered is another one entirely — she doesn’t want to take the chance.

So, instead of turning towards the service entrance type door, Akane makes her way to the second cell. Its door is identical to hers, and the input above the keypad indicates it takes a five-number code of digits zero through nine. She stares at it for a minute, two, and her head which was still a bit fuzzy before begins to clear. The streams of time slot slowly into focus again and Akane reaches out to brush her hands through them at the same time she trails her fingers over the numbered keys. There’s a hundred thousand possible combinations — 99,998 of which are wrong, one of which is right, and one of which is very wrong. With no one else to reach out to through the morphogenetic field, though, that’s all she can get.

And so, Akane does what she always does when she finds herself trapped in a strange room. She looks for clues.

Although the small hallway is devoid of furniture, the walls aren’t bare. Several paintings line the wall to her left. Five of them, in fact. They’re each different in color and subject, but something about the composition of them is similar. Akane tilts her head. Squints.

And then it hits her. There’s a cityscape, a pastoral piece with an orchard, a kelp forest, an abstract painting of a loose grid of rectangles, and a painting of a pantry interior. All five have a grid structure, and that structure matches the positions of the keys on the number pad. Each one has only one ‘button’ filled — with a person or an animal or an object or a pattern: 3-3-5-8-2.

It’s worth a shot, she supposes. And so, Akane returns to the cell door and begins keying in the numbers. Her finger pauses over the two as a flash of dread washes suddenly down her spine. For three seconds she freezes, evaluating that dread. Then she clicks the erase button and starts over — backwards to forwards this time. No unease follows, and when she hits the enter key, the lock clicks. With a turn of the wheel, she drags the door open.

The other prisoner didn’t manage to escape the effects of the gas, it seems. They’re prone on the floor of their cell, coat spread like a shroud around them, and Akane has to crouch to get a good look at the face beneath that salt and pepper hair.

She lurches backwards immediately.

The part of her that’s still a child — standing in that incinerator, staring down a puzzle she could never hope to solve alone — freezes in terror.

Hongou.

That’s Gentarou Hongou passed out in the floor of the cell next to hers. And for several seconds — too long, too long — it doesn’t matter that she’s already beaten him. It doesn’t matter that he failed, not once but twice, or that she manipulated him into getting her revenge on his co-conspirators for her. Because some part of her still sees him as the bogeyman.

Squeezing her eyes shut, Akane forces her breathing back under control. She stands, clenches her fists and digs her nails into her palms.

She almost closes the cell door again. Almost.

Only her own practicality reminds her that she’s done the work to open the cell already. But her skin still prickles as she turns to pace the rest of the hall and he falls out of her peripheral vision.

She needs to focus. Focus on more than just the physical walls around her. Akane takes a deep breath and closes her eyes.

There. There on the edge of her consciousness, is a familiar tug. Aoi. A smile flits across Akane’s face. If he can feel her, he can find her. That’s one of the perks of the connection they have. It’ll take time, but Aoi will find her eventually.

I’m coming, he thinks in her direction, and she can hear it like he’s standing next to her.

But the thought, though reassuring, gives her pause. She’s been kept alive. Alive, but trapped. Alive, but trapped, but mostly conscious, even though they know — have to know — about Aoi. That he’ll find her, that he always comes to get her.

Which means they want him to come.

It’s a trap.

Of course it is. Of course. She’s the perfect bait for Aoi and Junpei and the rest of the Crash Keys team.

Akane glances back at the open cell and the figure still collapsed there.

Why Hongou? Who would come for him? His team, his research partners, were all dead. Last Akane had heard, he was still a prisoner of...

SOIS. Of course.

What better way to lure them in than steal a prisoner right out from under their noses? Akane can almost imagine the look on Clover’s face. She’s bound to charge right in guns blazing.

So. What Akane needs to do is get them out, herself and Hongou, before anyone gets ensnared in Free the Soul’s trap. Well. Anyone else, anyway.

This time, instead of studying the walls around her, Akane makes a beeline for the door opposite their cells.

Up close, she can see that it has a large slot beneath its window — like a mail slot, but larger. Large enough to reach through, maybe. Cautiously, Akane slips a hand through the slot, going up on her tiptoes to peer through the window. The room beyond the door is furnished with a leather couch and a small table with some sort of game on it. Though Akane feels down and left, there’s no doorknob on the opposite side of the door. Just flat wood. But just as she’s extracting her hands, her fingertips brush something else, set just below the slot in the door.

A sliding puzzle. Of all the things. Akane rolls her eyes. She can feel the pieces under her hands as she reaches through the door slot, but... they’re on the outside. There’s no way to see—

Or is there?

As she traces her fingers over a piece, movement through the glass of the window catches her eye. A mirror. It’s not angled perfectly for the task, and there’s some sort of writing on it that obscures the reflection a little, but she can at least make out most of the scrambled puzzle design.

It’s an eye of Horus.

Goal in mind, Akane begins. The click and slide of the puzzle pieces is rhythmic, soothing. This, at least, is simple where everything else is complex. When she focuses on the image slowly emerging in front of her, she doesn’t have to fight back the knot of bile and anger in her chest at having been captured by Delta. She doesn’t have to think about all the small decisions that led her here, or how things could have been different. She doesn’t have to think about the man still lying unconscious six feet away. It all fades away.

“Miss?”

Akane starts at the voice. It’s Hongou, but not the way he sounds in her head when she thinks of him — not wild and frenzied, not spitting vitriol. Cautious. Gentle. Unassuming. The way his voice sounded when he called himself Ace. She turns to look at him from the corner of her eye, and his posture is just as soft as his tone.

“Did you open that door for me?” he continues, but Akane doesn’t respond. “It looks like we’ve both been taken prisoner here. My name is Gentarou Hongou.”

He’s limping. 

Every time his left foot touches the floor, he lets out a hiss from between his teeth. But he makes his way closer until they’re only a foot or two apart.

“What’s your name?” he asks kindly.

Akane forces down the lurch in her stomach. She doesn’t give in to the urge to pull her arms back through the slot in the door so she has a way to defend herself. Instead she takes a calming breath. One. Two. Three.

He wouldn’t even know it was her, with the prosopagnosia. She could be anyone if she doesn’t speak. Anyone at all.

But it’s the vindictive part, the part that wants him to know, that opens her mouth.

“My name is Akane Kurashiki,” she says with her heart pounding in her chest. “Long time no see, Mr. Hongou.”

It’s his turn to recoil, then. His turn to feel afraid. In some distant way, Akane knows it’s probably wrong of her to delight in that fear — but she does anyway. Eventually the darkness inside him falls over his features, hardening them into a familiar face that’s nothing like the soft and gentle mask of before.

Good. She prefers him like this. No pretenses between them.

“So,” Hongou says, slowly, limping towards the doors across from them. “They captured you as well.”

“Not for long,” Akane tells him.

And with a heavy click, she slides the last puzzle piece into place. The door unlocks.

As Akane pulls it open, she realizes the purpose of the slot in the door — for someone on the other side to twist the doorknob on this one. The very design attempting to make reaching her difficult is what’s allowing her to escape. The thought is satisfying.

Akane steps into the now-unlocked room, and Hongou follows. The door swings shut behind them.

Then, there are two loud, nearly-simultaneous clicks from either end of the room. Hongou whirls to ram his shoulder into the door they just passed through, but it doesn’t budge an inch. Akane doesn’t have to test the door across the room to know it’s locked, but she tries its handle anyway.

“Locked?”

Akane nods.

“We’re trapped,” she says. “At least for now.”

Because as she glances around the room, parts of it are minutely different. A panel has opened up on one wall. A section of the floor has flipped to reveal a box of some sort.

“A truce, then?” Hongou offers.

His voice isn’t false and charming. Nor is it threatening. It’s flat and practical, but it shakes just the tiniest bit on the last syllable.

“A truce?” Akane repeats, because she can’t think of anything else to say — a truce, with him, of all people?

She’s planning on getting him out of here with her for Clover’s sake anyway, but a truce implies trust.

“You need me.” His expression twists for a moment, just a moment. “We need each other. If we want to make it out of this place.”

He’s not wrong. The puzzles are all built to be accessed from the outside in, and designed with their ‘rescuers’ in mind — in other words, multiple people. Normally, any puzzles could then be bypassed to escape in the unintended direction — but if this one is any indication, the rooms lock at both ends when entered. So to escape, they still likely need to solve all the puzzles — possibly by working backwards at times, like with the sliding puzzle.

Physically, this can’t be done with only one person. She needs him if she’s going to get out of here. And she has to get out.

Aoi is coming. She just has to escape in time to meet him, and that’s all that matters. She needs to use every tool at her disposal — and that includes Hongou.

“Fine,” she tells him sharply, and begins searching for clues.

* * *

They... The thing is, they work well together. Efficiently. Their minds are similar in a way that might make Akane uncomfortable if she had more time to devote to navel-gazing or more of a proclivity for it. They’re both analytical. Sharp. Akane hardly has to ask for a piece of any particular puzzle in any of the rooms — Hongou is already ready and waiting with it. They crisscross the puzzle rooms, and even solving clues backwards on a busted ankle doesn’t seem to slow him down. They’re making good time.

That’s not to say that they’re happy about it, or even remotely cordial.

“I’ll handle this one,” Hongou says nastily, three rooms in, when Akane makes the mistake of flinching away from a puzzle built into a lit fireplace. “Wouldn’t want you to get burned.”

“I guess you are more expendable,” Akane bites back through a poisonous smile.

Still, they get into a rhythm. 

That’s Akane’s mistake — getting complacent. Lowering her guard.

She’s focused on the clicking of the dial lock in her hands, on the safe in front of her instead of the man next to her or the streams of time woven all around them. She doesn’t sense the prickling warning of wrongness until the solid thunk of some mechanism — not in the safe, but in the walls themselves.

“Look out!”

A wide hand slams into Akane’s side and sends her across the room. She hits the ground, and there’s a metallic shing, then the sound of liquid splattering the floor.

The fall knocked Akane’s bangs into her eyes, but they’re not so thick they can’t be seen through. Hongou is still standing, and his hand is clasped against his right side. Red soaks between his fingers, and droplets of it are scattered across the floor like petals.

Slowly, Hongou removes his hand from the wound in his side. Brings it up in front of his face. He looks at the blood smeared on his hand like he doesn’t know how it got there — brows furrowed, mouth hanging open in a soft oval of confusion. Akane, heart still pounding, pushes her hair out of her face.

She wants to ask him why he protected her. But her mouth won’t form the words, and in all honesty, she’s not sure he knows either. The two of them are cold, calculating, manipulative. Possibly even monsters in the right light. Akane could spin a tale that makes herself seem selfless, heroic... But the truth is that she and Hongou have both done whatever they had to in order to reach their own goals. There is no room for self-sacrifice or compassion for their enemies, not in the games they play.

And yet, he probably saved her life.

For a long uncomfortable moment, the silence stretches between them.

And then Akane’s practicality takes over.

He’s still bleeding. They have nothing to sterilize the wound, but they can at least bind it. She tears the tablecloth into strips for makeshift bandages and ignores the voice in her head suggesting she let him bleed out. It’s not the time for petty revenge, not when they’re so close to escaping.

And they are close. Akane can feel it. The branches of their timeline are solidifying into fewer and fewer outcomes. There’s less choices to make.

While Houngou catches his breath, Akane returns to the safe which almost killed her. This time, she knows the solution to the lock like it’s been laid out in front of her. She twists the lock left-right-left instead of right-left-right, and it clicks. The safe opens.

Inside it is a single brass key. Deceptively small, but heavy in her hand when she picks it up. It slots perfectly into the keyhole in the center of the wall. There are several clanks and clicks, some mechanism moving behind the walls, and at last both doors in the room unlock.

Akane walks over to the couch and pulls Hongou to his feet, slipping his left arm over her shoulders so she can take the weight off his injured foot without pulling at the wound in his side. They hobble towards the door, and open it.

Beyond is a long dark corridor. No puzzles or doors or traps — just a hallway that fades into blackness before she can see the end of it.

Akane steps through, bringing Hongou with her. Their progress is slow. And as time passes with no end in sight, it gets even slower. He doesn’t ask for a break, but if he passes out she’ll have to take all of his weight instead of only most of it — so Akane stops when Hongou seems particularly weak or weary. Leans him against the concrete walls to catch his breath.

“You could just leave me,” he says, wryly. “If I were you that’s what I would’ve done.”

“Just be glad I’m not like you, then. We’re almost there,” Akane says, and knows that it’s true.

She adjusts her grip, takes more of Hongou’s weight. They’re going to get out. Both of them.

She’s never going to forgive him for what he’s done — but she’s not going to leave him behind either. Not with Delta and Free the Soul. Hongou is a monster, but he’s her type of monster, and when he’s powerless he’s nothing more than a sad, pathetic old man. Right now, she’s not afraid.

The corridor ahead is long, and the stairs are steep. But when they reach the top, the door is unlocked. They shuffle out into the cold, crisp air of a forest that’s dusted with snow. Above them stretches a canopy of midnight blue, studded with a million glittering stars.

There’s a feeling in Akane’s chest, welling like a mountain spring — clean and clear and bright. She thinks it might be hope.


End file.
